Genre

I used to love classifying books into different genres. I’d think of all the labels I could apply to a book: speculative fiction, magical realism, historical fiction, horror, fantasy, high fantasy, stream-of-consciousness, surrealism, et cetera. I think I even knew what all those labels meant, or at least pretended to know what they meant.
I don’t anymore; thankfully.
I no longer care how or why people classify something. I want to read, not talk about reading. I don’t want to over-analyse things. Reading good fiction is a great pleasure, and being academic about it only kills the experience.
I’m with George R.R. Martin, when he groups SciFi, Fantasy and Horror into a just ‘weird stuff’. That’s more than enough for me.
Bertrand Russell once said:

There are two motives for reading a book: one, that you enjoy it; the other, that you can boast about it.

Well, I still do boast about reading. But I hope that recently it’s not been not as vain as I remember.